Tonight's picture was taken in April of 2007, on Mattie's 5th birthday. Mattie had a zoo party that year, and I will never forget that day, because it wasn't only raining, it was pouring. Because of the down pours, we had the zoo to ourselves. Ironically all the animals were outside, and enjoying the rain. Mattie and all his friends thought walking around in the rain and getting completely wet was an adventure. Fortunately they all had a great time, and as you can see from this picture, Mattie had a great day! The hat that Mattie was wearing is something we still have as a remembrance of that special occasion. The hat is currently sitting on the head of a stuffed animal in Mattie's room.
Quote of the day: The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he has an abscess on his knee or in his soul. ~ Rona Barrett
Last night I posted a picture of Lauren. Tonight I am posting a picture that features our other face of hope, Noah (an Osteosarcoma survivor). In this picture, Noah was walking around the track with Amanda (a Ewing's Sarcoma survivor).
This is Maya. Maya was a friend of Mattie's from Georgetown University Hospital. This is the second year Maya has come to the walk. When she arrived at the Walk this year she greeted me with a big hug. She is a very sweet, sensitive, and bright little girl. Maya showed me that she participated in Relay for Life earlier that day, and had Mattie's name painted onto her arm. She was walking for her friend, Mattie.
Many of our Faces of Hope are actually patients of Dr. Aziza Shad. As you can see Dr. Shad is standing next to one of her patient's posters. Trying to execute the faces of hope project was NO easy task for me. Parents are hesitant to share their child's face with an outsider. Naturally that is understandable. I was fortunate to generate 26 photos to display at the walk, and I was able to accomplish this because of my Georgetown Hospital home. I met many wonderful families while Mattie was being treated, so it made it a lot easier for me to contact these parents individually. It took time, but I am so proud of the 26 photos that I was able to display.
This afternoon, my parents, Karen, and I went to a Paul Gauguin exhibit at the National Gallery of Art. I am somewhat familiar with Gauguin's works, but I had no idea about his personal life. Gauguin spent a lifetime traveling to distant lands in search of a primitive paradise. Believing that the key to unleashing his creativity was to be found in faraway places not yet corrupted by civilization, he sojourned to ever more remote areas in Europe, the Caribbean, and Polynesia. On arriving at each destination he discovered that the reality he encountered was very different from the paradise he had imagined. He had envisioned each new place as a sacred world where people lived simply, freely, and without inhibitions, but he instead found complex societies with their own difficult realities. He turned to his art to capture this elusive paradise, depicting an idealized, mythic dreamworld.
The "Maker of Myth" exhibit explores the ways the artist created myths over the course of his career. Gauguin knew that most potent myths were not wholesale fabrications but rather those that blended fact with fiction. Karen took a picture of my mom and I right outside the Gauguin exhibit. We seem to blend right into the back drop of color. 
Two paintings of Gauguin's intrigued me. The first one is entitled, Self Portrait, 1889. Gauguin portrayed himself as an artist deeply divided. The upper part of the canvas depicts the artist as a saint, a halo hovering above him as he averts his eyes from the tempting apples. In the lower half, Gauguin appears as the tempter, holding the biblical snakes between his fingers.
I continue to be quite exhausted from the Walk, and feel asleep twice while writing tonight. But very soon, I will give you a more comprehensive description of Sunday's fabulous Walk.
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